Happy Nice Mall

The movements have heightened fears of a “splinternet” (or Balkanized internet) in which we have a number of national or regional networks that do not talk to each other, and perhaps even function, instead of the only global internet we have today. use of incompatible technologies.

This marks the end of the internet as a single global communication technology – and perhaps not just temporarily. China and Iran continue to use the same internet technology as the US and Europe, even if they only have access to some of their services. If such countries set up rival governing bodies and a rival network, only mutual agreement of all the great nations of the world could rebuild it. The era of a connected world would come to an end.

Some steps have already been taken towards such actions. Last month, the Ukrainian government effectively removed “.ru” sites from the internet, calling on ICANN, which oversees the internet’s domain name system, to suspend Russia’s access to the system.

ICANN, once a branch of the US Department of Commerce but now operating as a nonprofit, flatly rejected the proposal.

“[T]The Internet is a decentralized system. “No actor has the ability to control it or shut it down,” CEO Gorän Marby wrote in his response to the proposal. from working.”

Marby needs to be careful. ICANN has no legal or statutory authority over the domain name system; decisions are accepted voluntarily by all internet operators. This slows down the decision making process tremendously (everything needs to be decided by consensus), but it works to hold the internet together.

Other governing bodies of the Internet operate in much the same way; these are independent international organizations that work by agreement, not by force. Nearly everyone agrees that this is an awkward and cumbersome way to run a vital global infrastructure, but no one can agree on a better alternative.

Trying to agree on a new governance for the internet will require agreement of the nations of the world, something that is too rare to exist in the 21st century. But this means that the internet is held together by little more than by mutual voluntary agreement.

So what does a real splint look like in practice? And how close are we to it?

According to Milton Mueller of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy, a true fragmentation of the internet could take one of two forms, rather than different countries using different platforms on the same underlying architecture.

“The massive, severe fragmentation of the internet will involve a technically incompatible protocol used by a critical mass of the world’s population,” he says.

This first kind of fragmentation would not be catastrophic. “Technologists will likely find a way to combine the two protocols in a short time,” Mueller says.

The second form of fragmentation would be to continue using technically compatible protocols but have different governing bodies managing these services. This may be more difficult to reverse.

If Russia, China, or some other country has created and set up competitors to the bodies that manage IP addresses and DNS, putting them together may be more difficult than building competing technological protocols. Vested interests wishing to stay with one body or the other would form, making the politics of reconnection nearly impossible.

The problem of reconnecting these disparate networks into a single global internet will therefore be a political rather than a technical one – but it is often the political ones that are most difficult to resolve.

There are also a few more steps to complete disintegration of the internet, which can still have a significant impact in hindering the global flow of information or the smooth functioning of the internet in the case of a pariah.

Due to the monopoly nature of the Internet, some services have a quasi-infrastructure type status. Amazon Web Services, for example, is running the internet backend so hard that banning it from a specific region creates huge headaches. Similarly, cutting off access to github repositories paralyzes many services, at least temporarily.

Russia is trying to mitigate this risk between official and public sites, requiring them to send their data back to their countries, use .ru domains and minimize the use of overseas service providers. Sometime during the week’s panic, some took this as an instruction to all Russian websites, even leading to alarming (but so far unproven) articles suggesting that Russia plans to cut itself off from the internet altogether.

Other countries and groups have tried to alleviate the global nature of the internet, not just autocracies. The EU demands that all data processed on its citizens be processed within its borders, a move strongly opposed by the US tech giants.

Meanwhile, Iran has forged national links between its key online institutions, enabling it to run a kind of functional internet unique to Iran when it needs to shut itself off from the global network or is kicked out by an enemy.

But it is China that has perhaps the most famously complex relationship with the Internet. While Chinese-born tech companies generally thrive in the West – just look at TikTok – almost all online services used by people in China are Chinese companies. The country also runs a massive and regular form of online censorship, typically referred to as the Great Firewall of China.

GreatFire’s Charlie Smith* (a pseudonym for operating in China and critical of censorship policies) says its relationship with the global internet has changed over time.

“At first, service-level blocking was driven purely by censorship needs. “The need to hide information about Xi Jinping or to cover up some major disaster that can be directly attributed to the government,” he said. “But when these foreign websites were blocked, Chinese entrepreneurs realized there were gaps in the market that could be filled.

“They have not only filled these gaps, but also helped create Chinese internet companies that are just as valuable as their Western counterparts, although these Chinese companies are not well established outside of China.”

Thanks to these long-standing separate institutions, Smith argues, China could succeed in breaking away from the internet – but it’s largely not in its own interest to do so.

“I think China could cut itself off from the global internet and possibly if there was a big enough internal crisis… [but] I believe that China will continue to rely on the global internet. The Chinese diaspora is all over the world. Nobody wants their home connections cut off. Businesses will still rely on selling their products overseas.”

Instead, China – as befits a country with more than one billion internet users – is taking up senior positions in the various governing bodies of the internet and, for now, is slowly trying to bend standards, rules and protocols to suit it.

A splinternet is still possible – driven by politics rather than technology – but for now everyone seems eager to hold on and nudge the fragile status quo in their favour, at least if the internet was allowed to break it could happen. prove impossible to fix.

James Ball is the global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and author of “The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside the Shadow System That Shapes the Internet.”